Local Institutional Quality and Return Migration: Evidence from Viet Nam

This article examines the link between local institutional quality in the home country and locational choices of international return migrants. We scrutinize the locational choices of Vietnamese return migrants to the south central and the south regions of Viet Nam in 2014. Binary and multinomial regression models are fitted to identify the influence of migrants' individual attributes and the characteristics of regional destinations within Viet Nam. Our analysis reveals that both individual-specific and region-specific variables are significantly related to Vietnamese return migrants' choices when registering for permanent residency back in their home country. More remarkably, we provide compelling evidence of the positive role of institutional quality at the local level in these migration decisions. Moreover, the effect of institutional quality differs with the characteristics of migrants: regions with better institutional quality are more attractive both to younger return migrants and to those who returned from host countries with better institutional quality. International Migration